The story of Arthur is old. People have been singing war songs in his honor for probably more than 1,500 years. The popular conception is of a King Arthur, with his lovely queen and noble knights, and the Round Table, and Excalibur, and the Holy Grail, and all the other trappings. The scholarly conception of Arthur is of a war leader in post-Roman Britain, fighting against the encroachment of Saxon settlers. The pages that follow examine both conceptions.
Nice collection of links to information about the great King. Especially interesting is their FAQ:
Was Arthur a king or just a battle commander?
Was Guinevere really an adulteress?
Was Lancelot the greatest knight of them all?
Was Gawain a great knight or a royal pain?
Was Merlin an old magician or a young fortune-teller?
Who was the Lady of the Lake?
Was Galahad really so boring?
Did Perceval see the Holy Grail or didn’t he?
Was Morgan Le Fay really a witch?
Was Morgause to blame for all of Arthur’s troubles?
Over on youtube, there is a selection of very nicely done art technique tutorials at artistsnetwork. While the channel on youtube exists to promote their pay service at Artists Network, the tuturials are useful in and of themselves, involving traditional techniques that are demonstrated in a manner that the hand positions, etc. are easy to see.
My biggest quibble with the page, however, is the loud, interminable nature sound track that plays in the background, with no obvious way to turn it off. I’d view this one with the sound off on my computer…
The Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature in the Department of Special Collections at the University of Florida’s George A. Smathers Libraries contains more than 100,000 volumes published in Great Britain and the United States from the early 1700s through the current year. Its holdings of more than 800 early American imprints is the second largest such collection in the United States.
The product of Ruth Baldwin’s 40-year collection development efforts, this vast assemblage of literature printed primarily for children offers an equally vast territory of topics for the researcher to explore: education and upbringing, family and gender roles, civic values, racial, religious, and moral attitudes, literary style and format, and the arts of illustration and book design.
A great strength of the collection is the many English and American editions of the same work. Other strengths of the collection include 300 editions of Robinson Crusoe, 100 editions of Pilgrim’s Progress, fables, juvenile biography, 19th century science and natural history, 19th century alphabet books, moral tales, fairy tales, 19th century juvenile periodicals, 19th century boys’ adventure stories, 20th century boys’ and girls’ series, Little Golden Books, and juvenile publications of the American Sunday School Union and other tract societies. Scholars, students, and researchers from the University of Florida and worldwide continue to request assistance from this collection.
Lovely scans of the picture books; haven’t tried printing any off yet, but some look well worth the effort.
Here’s a site for all those who love to colour in patterns. There are designs for all ages. All you need to do is choose the pattern you like best, download it, print it out and get colouring. It’s easy and great fun - perfect for people who like to doodle but don’t know what to doodle.
Itching to get started? Just head for the blog where I’ll post all of my designs for you to download and fill in. Just remember its all for free.
I downloaded and printed out one of the patterns. It was in .png format and printed out, if not as nicely as a .eps or .svg file, reasonably well. Worth trying these with you or our kids…there’s even a “star chart” version to track a kid’s accomplishments.
These are the people behind Classical Conversations, which is a classical, trivium-based homescholl support organization with groups all over the country. My wife is going to be a tutor in this program, and we are going to place our middle child in it next year. I’ll let you know what I think when I have more personal experience with the program. The literature they produce is very impressive, so I’m hopeful.
There seems to be a lot of reference to our good friend Doug Wilson, but it has to be acknowledged that he’s considered a leader in this arena. We will approach it with the understanding that we may have to step in and contextualize and supplement some of the materials and presentations.
You all know of Google Books, but were you aware that it is a treasure trove of books published prior to the copyright laws that are in the public domain? These are not the plain text versions of the admirable-but-limited Project Gutenberg, but digitally scanned copies of published books from university libraries.
One of the limitation of Project Gutenberg is that it relies on transcribers to type or scan and correct copies of books in the public domain. This is very useful for archival and preservation purposes, so that books (which are disappearing from libraries at an alarming rate -public libraries becoming nothing more than PR fronts for “fashionable ideas”) that are important but unpopular or verboten will not disappear. But these Gutenberg files are subject to typographical errors and various other errors. Further, they are difficult to read due to the ignoring or ignorance of typographical conventions. And finally, unless you spend the time to reformat them into Word docs (which can become enormous in size), they are all but unreadble for any length of time due to eye fatigue.
With these limitations, which do not negate the value of Project Gutenberg but merely lessen it, I have begun recommending Google Books for serious researchers. Google, while not always behaving as it ought to have regarding copyrights, has the money and staff to get entire university libraries scanned and turned into PDF files, ready for free download. This is very powerful when it comes to books that once were on university library shelves but have been removed due to age or content.
Another advantage is that you will often see “Reformed” and “Theonomist” online bookstores selling some of these volumes for scores or hundreds of dollars, with the claim that they are “rare” and that “you can only get it here.” These are marketing exaggerations, if not outright lies, and Google Books is often the source of these volumes, which they have retyped, bound and sold in very expensive volumes. If you want your Google Books finds bound, you can do easily at Lulu.com and other site of the same type. I will be creating a thread on some of the amazing finds at Google Books, if you know what to look for.
As you know, The Art of Manliness is an awesome site for guys who were never tutored in what it can mean to be manly. In addition, they often have educational items that are of value to the younger men being raised among us. They are currently running a series called 30 Days to a Better Man. Today’s useful bit is about the value of memorization (and I cannot praise memorization highly enough; if one if going to use critical thinking and creativity, one must have material in ones mind worth thinking about).
Before Google and the internet, people memorized stuff. When your grandpa went to school, memorization was the main method of learning, and he had to commit things like the Gettysburg Address and sonnets by William Shakespeare to memory. Decades ago, rote leaning went entirely out of fashion amongst educators, in favor of helping students think creatively and problem solve. Yet, the pendulum swung a bit too far, and the baby got chucked out with the bathwater. For in truth, there are many advantages to memorizing information. After all, while it’s important to be able to think and apply knowledge, if you don’t have any knowledge to apply, knowing how to apply it is pretty useless. This is where memorization comes in.
While this segment of instruction is just a preview for the entire Workshop, it is a nice little bit of instruction on its own. Good enough that I am seriously thinking of purchasing the whole Workshop (now that’s good marketing).
There is a link on the page where you may purchase the workshop.
While I cannot vouch for the amount of homeschool-related books, music, dvds, or video games available through this site, it does seem like a good idea. Basically you swap one item for another.
I just searched for this, and couldn’t locate the post…not sure if I never posted it, or it went into the ether somewhere. In any event, here’s the curriculum about the War Between the States published online by SCV Camp #674. They also offer a CD of it for $10, a worthwhile donation to a good cause.
This is certainly not the ideal way of homeschooling, but is something to think about. In states where the company has had it program approved, it is free, and allows one to keep your children at home while having them be legally a public school student. It would certainly be an improvement on sending one’s child to a state school in person.
K¹² has become the largest provider of online learning for grades K-12, because we know better than anyone else how to build engaging curriculum that blends online and offline learning experiences. We also enable differentiated instruction down to the individual level — rooted in decades of educational research.
